William Higgins, an English astronomer, born in London, Feb. 7, 1824. He was educated at the city of London school and by private tutors, and devoted himself successively to natural philosophy, astronomy, and microscopy, attaining great proficiency in each. In 1855 he erected an observatory near his residence at Upper Tulse hill, furnishing it with a transit instrument and an equatorial of 8 in. aperture manufactured in Cambridge, Mass. At first he was occupied with observations of double stars, and he also made drawings of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn; but later he gave almost his entire attention to the application of spectrum analysis to the examination of comets and nebulae, and his most valuable achievements have been in this field. In 1862, as a preliminary task, he spent several months in mapping the spectra of 26 chemical elements; the results are published in the " Philosophical Transactions " for 1864. In his prismatic observation of the stars he was assisted by Dr. William A. Miller, and the gold medal of the royal astronomical society was awarded to them jointly in 1867, Mr. Huggins having received one of the royal medals in 1866. He has proved that the proper motion of a star in the line of sight can be determined by any small change of position in the lines of the spectrum, and thus he calculates that Sirius is moving away from the earth at the rate of 27 m. a second.

He has made valuable observations on the solar prominences, showing how their forms may be seen, and has detected the heat received at the earth from some of the fixed stars. In 1869 he delivered the Rede lecture at Cambridge, in which he gave an account of his discoveries. In 1871 the royal society placed at his disposal a telescope of 15 in. aperture, which was placed in a new observatory at Upper Tulse hill. For an account of his observations of the spectra of comets, see Comet, vol. v., p. 141.